Ghost Town Media on the Making of the Video for Linkin Park's A Light That Never Comes'
Flash is required! --
Released last fall on MTV, Linkin Park's music video, A Light That Never Comes , loosely tells the story of Judy, a young woman attempting to navigate her way through a CG landscape in which each Linkin Park band member, as well as collaborator DJ Steve Aoki, perform in their own, separate districts. Linkin Park's DJ Joe Hahn served as video director for the nearly four-minute video, which was created by Los Angeles-based Ghost Town Media.
The project is one of many that Hahn and Ghost Town's creative director Brandon Parvini have worked on together since 2009 when Hahn saw the video that Ghost Town made for Kanye West's Welcome to Heartbreak. Relying primarily on MAXON's CINEMA 4D and After Effects, the duo share a self-taught approach to VFX, Parvini says. We like to find creative ways for getting things done without getting mired in a big VFX process with a team of 30 people. With CINEMA 4D I was able to get a few guys in here who have really good taste and get them up and running really fast.
Physical Meets Digital
Hahn and Parvini have long discussed how they might explore ways to have live images exist in digital space. For this video, they came up with an overall look that conveys the core concepts of a remix, Parvini says, in that you're taking something from somewhere else and repurposing it.
Parvini scanned all of the band members in various positions and at different angles for use as raw 3D assets. In addition to the static 3D scans, Parvini and Ghost Town devised a system to capture sequential 3D objects, allowing the band to perform and have the performances played back in post-similar to how you would normally play back video in a non-linear editor.
Early conception consisted of finding images they responded to and weaving them together loosely to get an understanding of the look they wanted. Next, they created a map showing each separate district with Aoki's district in the center. Ghost Town brought on director and 3D and VFX artist Noah Rappaport (http://vimeo.com/noahrappaport/videos) to lead the team in charge of planning and developing the city that serves as the main setting for the video.
Wrangling a Monster
During the two months they worked on the video, the biggest challenge Ghost Town Media faced was the sheer expansiveness of the piece, Parvini says. Because CG is ubiquitous these days, it's easy to take for granted what it takes to create an entire digital world. But for a small production house, the reality is you're wrangling a monster, he explains.
We had to build the whole place brick by brick, and having to make everything, gather all of the assets and drop them in all scenes was really challenging. I think at one point we had about 70,000 buildings in our city setup, which is around the same as Manhattan. (Watch the process video here.)
It helped that they were able to use CINEMA 4D's MoGraph to clone many of the buildings they needed.
Combining stock models and custom-built building structures, Ghost Town used cloned instances in CINEMA 4D to allow for quick population of buildings across specific segments of the city. Using the instance cloner system after the buildings were populated allowed Ghost Town to quickly adjust positions and final angles.
Boosting Render Times
Rendering was another major hurdle to overcome. Ghost Town used Dell Precision Workstations for the heavy rendering of the project, but even with their systems completely built out to handle the renders, GI rending was simply too cumbersome and slow. After struggling with workflow for a few weeks, Parvini opted to upgrade from CINEMA 4D R14 to R15, even though he knew it was ill-advised to make that kind of change in the middle of a project.
Fortunately, the upgrade paid off. Once we got our hands on R15's new light caching system we saw dramatic improvements to the timeframes and render times, so we could use Global Illumination to get the look we wanted in a quarter of the time, he says.
Read the full-length feature at Studio Daily.
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Ghost Town Media on the Making of the Video for Linkin Park's A Light That Never Comes'
